John Potterton

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An engineering manager at an energy company—we’ll call him John Healy—wanted to sell his boss on a safer and cheaper gas-scrubbing technology. This might have been an easy task if his boss, the general manager, hadn’t selected the existing system just a year before. Instead it was, in Healy’s …

Let’s face it: some bosses are not inspiring. They don’t motivate us to perform at our best — let alone improve our skills. What should you do if your boss is too hands-off, ambivalent, or downright demotivating? How can you keep your engagement up and your own professional goals on track? Is it …

Research repeatedly suggests that levels of employee engagement in the workplace are low and worsening. But what really perplexes executives when we talk to them is that their employees are often fully engaged in a host of other activities.<p>Among the growing perplexed population is Mark Barnes (not …

Faced with the challenge of inventing a new summer cocktail, one Brooklyn bartender turns to the Franco-Italian liqueur genepy for a new twist<p><i>Welcome to Out of the Kitchen, our ongoing exploration of the people and relationships that built and sustain Andrew Tarlow’s Brooklyn restaurant mini-empire.</i><p>…

With Will Dean’s customer base helping each other up sweat and mud-slicked slopes and crawling past competitors in electrified sludge pits, the CEO and cofounder of Tough Mudder has to have an even more unique view on his staff’s work.<p>How else could they dream up sadistic, somehow-addictive designs …

The tech titans of Silicon Valley are actively circling the strategic value of design. I didn’t take their interest seriously until I saw the news in December that John Maeda, the former President of the Rhode Island School of Design, joined venerable VC firm Kleiner Perkins. He’s the Valley’s …

Who gave away the most money of any American last year? Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, 29, and wife Priscilla Chan, 28, who donated nearly $1 billion to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. That gift made up a sizable chunk of the $7.7 billion the top 50 Americans gave away to …

McKinsey shouldn’t close up shop just yet. But if Wikistrat has its way, the future of geopolitical analysis will belong to the crowd.<p>The biggest consultancy firms–the McKinseys and Janeses of the world–make many millions of dollars predicting the future and writing what-if reports for clients. …

With less than a second remaining on the clock in a game against La Bruixa d’Or, Real Madrid Baloncesto’s Felipe Reyes caught a full-court heave from a teammate, then threw the ball up over his head toward the basket.<p>Somehow, the thing went in. The odds Reyes could hit this shot again have to be …

Six years ago, I took the plunge and went freelance. It was a radical decision. I’d been an employee for virtually all of my career. My self-employed husband and I had three small children at the time. We had a mortgage to pay and no way to get health insurance aside from buying it ourselves.<p>Our …

The main reason our e-mail in-boxes consume so much of our time is that we have little control over how many messages we receive. But we <i>can</i> control how many messages we send. That seemingly obvious insight sparked a significant reduction in one company’s e-mail traffic: After the executives reduced …